Igor Tamm

(1895 - 1971)

Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm was a Jewish Soviet physicist and recipient of the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Tamm was born in Vladivostok, Russian Empire (now Russia), studied
at the grammar school in Yelisavetgrad (now Ukraine). In 1913-1914 he
studied at the Edinburgh University. He graduated from the Moscow University
in 1918.

He was Nobel
Laureate in Physics for the year 1958 together with Pavel
Alekseyevich Cherenkov and Ilya
Mikhailovich Frank for the discovery
and the interpretation of the Cherenkov-Vavilov effect.

In 1951, together with Andrei
Dmitrievich Sakharov, Tamm proposed a tokamak
system of the realization of CTF on the
basis of toroidal magnetic thermonuclear
reactor and soon after the first such devices
were built by the INF,
resulting the T-3 Soviet magnetic confinment
device from 1968, when the plasma parameters
unique for that time were obtained, of showing
the temperatures in their machine to be
over an order of magnitude higher than what
was expected by the rest of the community.
The western scientists visited the experiment
and varified the high temperatures and confinement,
sparking a wave of optimism for the prospects
of the tokamak as well as construction of
new experiments, which is still the dominant
magnetic confinement device today.